


Come Take a Ride in my Big Blue Chevy

by nefretemerson (MrsNefretEmerson)



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, pick-up trucks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-30
Updated: 2017-03-30
Packaged: 2018-10-12 22:57:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10501188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrsNefretEmerson/pseuds/nefretemerson
Summary: Everyone on the island knows Steve drives a truck. It's the first thing rookies in the HPD are warned about: don't mention the truck. Don't ever mention the truck.





	

**Author's Note:**

> In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that that author herself drives a big honkin' truck. A really big honkin' truck.

The truck’s name was Henrietta and she was one tough lady. There was something comforting about the truck. She was massive and obnoxious and generally out of place during a car chase. She guzzled gas at an exceptional rate and was a vaguely hypocritical vehicle for an environmentalist to drive.  She was a raging bitch to parallel-park. Driving her down narrow city streets was an adrenalin rush every time. But she was safe.

Sitting in the driver’s seat felt like sitting in an impenetrable fortress. The engine block was an unyielding battering ram. She was solid, practical. Nothing could touch him as he drove above the heads of every other person on the highway. She was an intimidating mass of shiny chrome and glittery blue paint, and she dominated every situation it was put into. No one could ignore Henrietta. She gave him an identity, a sense of immediate similarity and recognition with every other person driving a pick-up. She was an anchor in a world that kept on changing on him. She was a hunk of metal unconnected with any particular person. That truck wouldn’t ever betray him. Henrietta was Steve’s and Steve’s alone.

As soon as he accepted the Governor’s job offer, Steve knew he’d need something to drive, a person couldn’t get around in a rusted out wreck of a Marquis or afford to drive rentals indefinitely. He ended up at a Hummer dealership, but they weren’t right. They were accessories. They were so far from the armored castles he’d ridden in for the past fifteen years that they might as well have been a separate species. They represented something that made his stomach roil just thinking about it: the belief that on some fundamental level a sheltered, suburban civilian ‘expert’ could ever understand his experiences. The bright yellow made him sick.

He tried a compact next. Cute, fuel efficient, great maneuverability, excellent acceleration, the sporty little Audi was a fun ride, but it was cramped in all the wrong ways. It was too light and too insubstantial. He thought back to shifting sands and mortar fire, firefights and hostile territory and he knew he’d never feel comfortable driving it. It wasn’t right.

He got behind the wheel of an SUV next, but knew immediately it wouldn’t work. The Range Rover exemplified a type of stable, mundane upper-middle classeness that he just couldn’t identify with. He felt like he ought to be driving out to a golf course on his weekends, not the Naval base. The car belonged on a perfectly paved driveway surrounded by manicured lawns and identical McMansions. It belonged in ease and comfort, not in his gritty, fractured life. 

He moved on. The cherry red Corvette was calling his name, but it was completely impractical and he couldn’t get the classic car in what was now his garage out of his head. He couldn’t bring himself to buy it.

Steve caught sight of the line of pick-ups marching across the other end of the Chevy dealership and just knew. The moment he climbed into the cab of the Silverado, he knew he’d found his match. The color was wrong though. The pristine white exterior exuded a sense of smug impracticality. The red one down the line looked like it belonged to an image obsessed frat bro. The unrelieved black of the next was far too serious for easy-going island living. But the blue. The blue was the color of the ocean in the Caribbean. The blue soothed the portion of his mind still reeling from his voluntary separation from the only stable thing he’d known his whole life. Blue for the Navy. Blue for the waves he called home.

The truck, once he got it home, was almost as big as his house it seemed. He wouldn’t be able to fit her in the garage even if he’d wanted to.  Besides the satisfied feeling of a job well done, Steve didn’t think about the truck for the rest of the day: he had other things on his mind. The next morning though, he was stopped at a four-way stop sign when an enormous Dodge Ram pulled up going the opposite direction. The nod of greeting Steve got, and which he automatically returned, suddenly inducted him into a club he hadn’t known existed. Three days later he struck up a conversation at the gas pump with a grizzled old man driving a seriously lifted Sierra. Hawai’i was starting to feel like a place he could once more call home.

**Author's Note:**

> As much as I love a good pick-up, I've got to admit that the idea of chasing down suspects in a big blue truck is a bit ridiculous. This is an attempt at explaining the truck, which I adore.


End file.
